Circle, a cryptocurrency-focused financial-services firm, announced today that it is buying crypto exchange Poloniex. The move makes Circle one of the largest and most influential companies in the industry. According to Fortune, Circle is paying USD 400 million for the acquisition.
Goldman Sachs-funded Circle consists of: Circle Pay for fiat transfers, Circle Trade, a liquidity provider of cryptocurrencies, and the soon-to-be-launched Circle Invest, an app that will allow retail customers to invest in crypto markets.
According to Circle’s statement, “Poloniex addresses a key element of product foundation: An open global token marketplace.
“We look forward to giving dedicated focus to scalability, reliability, and robustness,” stated Circle co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire on the company’s blog. “We also look forward to scaling Poloniex up and out through market expansion and localization, increasing token listings where possible and appropriate, and exploring the fiat USD, EUR, and GBP connectivity that Circle already brings to its compliant Pay, Trade, and Invest products.”
One of the world’s leading token marketplaces, Polinex is available in over a hundred countries worldwide and, according to the statement, It was one of the first exchanges in the world to offer liquidity in Ethereum and the first exchange to reach USD 1 billion in daily volume.
“We believe that the contractual rules around exchange for anything and everything will become increasingly represented in distributed global software, rely on inconvertible distributed shared memory in the form of distributed ledgers, and benefit from the services of global multidimensional marketplaces such as Circle Poloniex,” stated Neville and Allaire.
According to Fortune, Circle is also working on Centre, a protocol that is going to make Alipay, PayPal, Circle and other digital wallets interoperable.
image: Circle co-founders Sean Neville and Jeremy Allaire
